“Powerpoint slides are like children: no matter how ugly they are, you’ll think they’re beautiful if they’re yours” — Scott Adams, author of the comic strip “Dilbert”. Due to this cause or another, it’s a huge stress to look at most Powerpoint slides. Depending on the “design” skills of the speaker and audience’s taste slides create different emotions from a slight annoyance to physical sickness.
But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that instead of improving the presentation such slides confuse the audience, distract it and finally oblige the speaker to explain them rather than being quite self-explanatory.
The goal of this course is to change that by equipping learners with a set of tools to create simple, clear and aesthetic slides which improve the presentation of the speaker. The course covers universal design principles, templates, colors, typefaces, slides’ typography, use of photos and pictograms, composition rules and ways to create clear and meaningful charts and diagrams.
This course is not a PowerPoint fundamentals course. You should have a basic knowledge of either Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote software.
Don’t meddle, make your slides matter.

Reviews

AA

Just a suggestion some of the text that appear in most of the videos is not in English so its difficult to relate to the explanation. if something could be done on this part will be helpfull

S

May 08, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

It was remaining very useful to me and I learnt to design the presentation slides somewhat like professionally i think and I am satisfied with this course contents and thanks Alexie sir

From the lesson

Part 2: Templates and colors meaning

This week is about templates, colors and fonts. What's wrong with most templates? Which page decorations should you use to make your slide look beautiful? (None!) What information can we pass through the colors? How to choose a typeface? Does a proper typeface make all the difference? (Yes, it does).

Taught By

Alexei Kapterev

Transcript

Backgrounds. Many default templates in PowerPoint or Keynote have very elaborate, very complex backgrounds, like this one for example. They imitate paper, they imitate wood, they imitate cloth – lots and lots of different things. And we do not use those templates anymore. They are a legacy of a design approach, which as it turns out was a passing fashion called skeumorphism. And let me explain what that is. This is an American-built woodie station wagon and they used to be made out of wood. But then the car makers gradually transitioned to steel bodies for their cars. But the wood was kept for, I don't know, nostalgia reasons. It was familiar to the target audience. They used to be for years and years and years. They looked at those woodie station wagons, and it was just too much of a shift for them. So, they replaced the actual wood with imitation wood. And even up to now, if you look at this very modern design by Ford, those horizontal lines on the side of the car, they are paying homage to that era. And the same was true for computer design for a number of years. The electronic shelf used to look like the actual bookshelf, and people were amazed. Oh my god! It looks like exactly like the real thing. The electronic notepad used to look like the actual notepad with little bits of torn paper there – and it looked gorgeous. So, the main idea was that we are trying to make new things familiar. Lots and lots of people are switching from physical notepads to iPads, for example, and we're trying to make things easier for them. But over time, people started to understand that there's just way too many excessive details here. Once you know how these things work, you do not need this fake leather and fake paper anymore. And the new design approach was pioneered by Microsoft this time and it was called flat design. And it looked like this, very streamlined, sometimes even, you know, stretching the definition of simplicity, sometimes overly simple. But at the moment, this is what's in vogue. And in about a year or two, everybody including Apple went from what's on the left to what's on the right. Radical simplification, much more clearer design and much cheaper design. Frankly, we do not need to put in all of this, you know, work on those details. So, flat design is trying to make more with less. We're trying to make things as simple as possible. And of course, flat design was widely criticized by being way too flat. And at the moment, we see something called Flat 2.0, for example, an approach by Google called Material Design which tries to combine certain elements of skeumorphism with flat design. As you can see, there are shadows here which is a very distinctive feature of skeumorphic design, but also it uses flat elements, and I think it is very distinctively Google. You cannot confuse this with anything else. The big problem of flat design, of course, is just all the same – it's the same for every corporation and we're trying to differentiate ourselves. This, for example, is a very distinctive Keynote template. I don't think you will have any trouble telling what company this is. This is, of course, Apple. And if you look at most of the large I.T. companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook, they all have something like this. They have their distinctive shade of blue or gray or some other color, and they use it with great effect. No page numbers, no logos, no nothing. Many people ask me, should I use light or dark background? And personally, I prefer light personally, I prefer white. I think it works much better if you print your slides and also it works great with pictures isolated on white. Sometimes, you have pictures without any background and they work seamlessly with white slides. Also, an additional bonus, sometimes you have to present in huge venues where the whole audience sits in the dark and light bounces off the screen. You can actually see at least the first and probably the second row of the audience, works for me. And also, an added bonus, sometimes you have to present in a huge audiences where people sit in the dark, and light bouncing off the screen allows you to see the first and probably the second row of the audience. You actually see the people you're talking to, which is very important for me, at least. And you can go for dark backgrounds. They are more distinctive and they are easier on the eyes in big venues. The reason they mostly use dark backgrounds is because if you have to sit in the audience and look for an hour and a half at white, big, white screen, your eyes get tired rather quickly. So, if you have a very long presentation in a big venue, dark background is your choice. Otherwise, I'd go for just simply white.

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